Cornerstone project to address mechanical challenges of all-electric flight

The aerospace industry has been investing heavily in the search for alternatives to combustion engines, in a bid to cut carbon dioxide emissions and reduce its dependence on Earth’s decreasing fossil fuel reserves.

But the great distances aircraft must travel between refuelling stops has made this a considerable challenge, with battery technology not yet sufficiently developed to cope with long range journeys, for example.

The new £6.1m EPSRC-funded project, called Cornerstone, which includes researchers from Nottingham University, Imperial College London and Oxford University, will undertake research into areas of mechanical engineering that will help the industry move towards electrification, according to the project’s principal investigator Seamus Garvey of Nottingham University.

“There is an assumption that moving towards electric flight requires electrical engineering only, and that is utterly wrong, some of the biggest challenges are in fact mechanical engineering challenges,” he said.

The project will focus on six areas of mechanical engineering research. These include an attempt to better understand high power-density contacts, or those locations within an engine where there are very high stresses occurring between two surfaces, such as gear teeth.